Voter Intelligence In 2016: Data Science Is The New Baby Kissing

This 2016 campaign season reminds us that modern politics is increasingly data-driven. Like any business, political campaigns seek to use data to develop new insights and gain advantages. Data-driven best practices flow back and forth between political campaigns and marketing groups. Innovations and experts honed in one domain tend to migrate to the other. The state of the art has advanced to the point where the 2012 Obama campaign claimed it could name almost every one of the nearly 70 million Americans who cast a vote for him. But the evolution is ongoing. The changing nature of the data-driven game in electoral politics reflects the proven tactics and techniques that can be borrowed from customer intelligence leaders in financial services, retail and other sectors. For instance, big data techniques are…